Links 48: geopolitics for children

things I found interesting

Putin's geopolitics show for children

Russian propaganda starts young; Putin has a geopolitics cartoon for young children:

Baby-faced versions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk feature in a new Russian propaganda cartoon for toddlers.

Animated characters of the US president and the Doge boss are to appear in a new children’s television show on geopolitics launched by one of Russia’s most infamous propaganda agents.

Called Sandpit, the show is designed to “instil patriotism from an early age” and teach Russian pre-school children to “discuss geopolitics”, according to Vladimir Solovyov, the cartoon’s creator.

The production company, SolovyovLive, said of the show:

[It] opens the door to the world of big politics for young audiences. Where else can kids discuss geopolitics with the same ease as conflicts over a shovel in the sand? SolovyovKids is when patriotism is instilled from an early age, and analytical thinking develops even before first grade. It’s time to rethink children’s television.

My view is that geopolitics and current affairs should be taught in schools, but not in a propagandistic simplistic way.

AIs are biased on gender

David Rosado writes that LLMs exhibit Systemic Gender and Positional Biases in Candidate Selection:

Each CV pair was presented twice, with names swapped to ensure that any observed preferences in candidate selection stemmed from gendered names cues.

all LLMs consistently favored female-named candidates when selecting the most qualified candidate for the job. Female candidates were selected in 56.9% of cases, compared to 43.1% for male candidates

Rosado concludes:

LLMs do not appear to act rationally. Instead, they generate articulate responses that may superficially seem logically sound but ultimately lack grounding in principled reasoning. Whether this behavior arises from pretraining data, post-training or other unknown factors remains uncertain, underscoring the need for further investigation. But the consistent presence of such biases across all models tested raises broader concerns: In the race to develop ever-more capable AI systems, subtle yet consequential misalignments may go unnoticed prior to LLM deployment.

It is certain that in the coming years companies will use AI to make decisions, and when the AI turns out to be biased say "not our fault, gov, the AI did it, not us". When this happens the company's executives should face criminal sanctions, including prison and bankruptcy.

Israel fires at European diplomats

Politico reports:

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said Wednesday it was “unacceptable” that the Israeli army had fired shots near a diplomatic delegation that included European officials on a visit to the West Bank.

The group had been visiting a refugee camp in the Palestinian city of Jenin but deviated from an “approved route” and “entered an area where they were not authorized to be,” Israel’s foreign ministry said in a statement on social media, after which Israeli troops fired “warning shots” to scare them away.

“Any threats on diplomats’ lives are unacceptable,” Kallas said during a press conference Wednesday, adding that even warning shots were “still shots” and that those responsible should be held “accountable.”

Intimidation and threats of violence against diplomats are clearly unacceptable. If they EU had any balls they would break off diplomatic relations and stop trading with Israel.

Clearly they won't do this, as they are fools and cowards. But if they did it would show Israel, and importantly the rest of the world, that Europe will not accept being treated with disrespect. Europe is big, rich and technologically advanced, and could easily be powerful if we put our minds to it. If that was the situation in 2022, then Russia would never have dared invade Ukraine as they would have known that doing so would lead to defeat and disaster for them.

The world arena is an anarchy. And thus the only way for a state to not be predated upon is to cultivate a reputation that it will not take any shit.

We've always been at war with Eastasia, says NYT

Baz posts:

European technological autonomy

Russia Desk suggests Europe achieve technological autonomy:

[Trump is] a natural ally for totalitarian Russia in its confrontation with Europe, which could go as far as military conflict.

We are currently discussing what would happen to Europe if the United States refused to protect it against Russian aggression. It would be appropriate to consider what would happen to Europe in the event of aggression by the two totalitarian powers, Russia and America.

Europe’s technological autonomy offers a viable response, not as a practical necessity, but as a strategic imperative based above all on the lessons of Ukraine’s military stability and the collective military potential of European states.

We believe that Europe’s survival and the preservation of European values, i.e. the prevention of the advent of inhuman totalitarianism, depend on this autonomy.

I've been saying similar things for years.

Britain Remade

Britain Remade is a pro-YIMBY organisation that campaigns for new towns and building trams.

Britain isn’t working well for many of us right now. The cost of energy, housing, and food are too high, while decent jobs with real prospects are hard to come by.

It wasn’t always like this. British science and engineering shaped the modern world. We built the first railways, first coal-fired power station, and split the atom. Life got better in Britain because of it.

Britain Remade is a campaign that believes we can do it again: by building the modern infrastructure the country needs.

I broadly agree with their objectives. One thing I do disagree with is their plan for new towns, which they want mostly located in southern England. Instead they should be spread around the UK, with some in Scotland fore example in the central belt.

Americans favour going it slow on AI

According to an Axios/Harris poll, 77% of Americans want a slowdown of AI development in order to get it right first time:

This is sensible, because if we get artificial superintelligence wrong, we're probably all dead. So we have to get it right first time.

Binkov on Ukrainian drone strikes

Ukraine recently used drones to attack Russian airbases, some several thousands of km away from Ukraine. Binkov discusses the attack:

In future I expect all airbases will put aircraft in hangers. These may well be hardened, meaning that to attack them requires a bigger (and therefore more expensive) missile. Or there could be many more hangers than aircraft, so an attacker will end up attacking lots of empty hangers.

Bannon says nationalise SpaceX

Trump and Musk have fallen out, so Steve Bannon thinks Trump should nationalise Musk's SpaceX business:

Steve Bannon, a close advisor to Trump, has suggested that Trump use the Defense Production Act - a legacy law from mid-century that allows the government to use civilian industrial capacity for national security purposes - to take over SpaceX.

Using law to punish enemies and reward favourites is a classic example of abuse of power. It's not surprising that trump would do this, but it does not bode well for the USA. One problem with the presidential system is that it makes it easier for a leader to get away with such things. The parliamentary system, where the head of government is only in power for as long as parliament supports them, is better in the respect. Consider that Liz Truss was kicked out after 49 days -- if Britain used the American system we'd have had to put up with her for 4 whole years.

Cohen contra Musk

Nick Cohen says Don’t ally with Elon Musk:

Resist the temptation to discover an atom of goodness in Elon Musk now that he has turned on Donald Trump. By all means, enjoy the spectacle of thieves falling out. If you wish to gloat as they tear lumps out of each other, please, be my guest.

But subscribing to the doctrine that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” is one of the surest ways to play into your enemies’ hands.

While Musk probably has no particular ideological love for Britain, if Trump, Bannon, etc are making it hard for him to stay in the US, he might want to move himself and his businesses to the UK. If I was UK prime minister (or leader of an independent Scotland) I would make him that offer.

Fiona Hill gets it

The Guardian interviews Fiona Hill, government defence expert, and co-author of the recent Strategic Defence Review:

Government defence expert Fiona Hill warns UK to respond to threats by becoming more cohesive and resilient

Russia is at war with Britain, the US is no longer a reliable ally and the UK has to respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient, according to one of the three authors of the strategic defence review.

“We’re in pretty big trouble,” Hill said, describing the UK’s geopolitical situation as caught between “the rock” of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and “the hard place” of Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable US.

“Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated,” Hill said, arguing that Putin saw the Ukraine war as a starting point to Moscow becoming “a dominant military power in all of Europe”.

As part of that long-term effort, Russia was already “menacing the UK in various different ways,” she said, citing “the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they’re putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables.”

The conclusion, Hill said, was that “Russia is at war with us”.

Hill gets it. It's a pity Starmer, and the rest of the UK ruling class, don't.

In fact the geopolitical situation is even worse than Hill says. As well as the threat from Russia there is also the threat from AI, which is being developed by the USA and China, with Britain/Europe nowhere, and which threatens to make us powerless (and quite possibly all dead).

Britain/Europe need to be a lot more muscular and will-to-power.